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Olmsted's Original UPI Series

An Elaborate Fraud Series Part 7: In Which the BMJ’s Prime Example of Wakefield’s Alleged Misconduct Proves Flagrantly False

One of the 12 children on a doctor visit not long after the BMJ articles were published in January.

By Dan Olmsted

In January, The British Medical Journal began its attack on Dr. Andrew Wakefield by claiming he altered every single one of 12 children's case histories to create a phony link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In five cases, it said, signs of autism actually began before the shot was even given.

As the strongest case in point, author Brian Deer described how Child 11's symptoms appeared “too soon” -- a full two months before the measles-mumps-rubella shot. Deer said the father himself spotted the "anomaly" and was deeply upset about Wakefield's deception.

But none of that is true.

Child 11’s measles-mumps-rubella shot came first, and the symptoms of physical illness and regression followed, just as Wakefield reported. No one but Deer claims otherwise. Multiple records by independent medical experts establish the facts, the child’s father confirms them, and BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee and Deer have known it for months – because I told them about it and showed them the evidence, and so did the father.

Yet Godlee has refused to correct that error and numerous others of similar significance, continuing to publicly insist there were none.

This is the strange counter-factual universe into which the British medical establishment has plunged the controversy over autism and vaccines. The BMJ’s Wakefield investigation – despite peer-review and supposedly rigorous fact-checking – is replete with the kind of misrepresentations, elisions and outright falsehoods it charges Wakefield with committing.

To date, installments in our series have examined the BMJ’s failure to adhere to its own standards of confidentiality and fairness, as well as tactics employed by Deer, whom it commissioned to investigate Wakefield – tactics that included “blagging,” or using a false identity, to interview parents of vaccine-damaged children for The Sunday Times of London, where most of the material later reported in the BMJ first appeared. (In the wake of the News International scandal, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times has now banned blagging, although Deer said he remains “immensely proud” of his reporting techniques.)

We now turn to the elements of fraud alleged by Deer and the BMJ. We begin,as the journal did, with Child 11. None of the children were named in the original 1998 Lancet article written by Wakefield and 12 co-authors. Like Deer, I was able to determine the families’ identities but – unlike Deer, whose reporting was limited and selective – I reached out to every one I could find, and in every case heard a very different account from the one Deer reported.

--

I met Father 11 at a Peet’s Coffee shop in an affluent, picture-perfect Southern California enclave, and we sat outside in the mid-60s sunshine he jokingly called “a little frosty.” A wealthy businessman who lives in a gated community nearby, he wore a light jacket emblazoned with “Cal,” for the University of California at Berkeley where he got an engineering degree. He carried a thin file folder and a spiral notebook.

In this laid-back setting, it was hard to grasp the role he and his family have played in one of the major medical controversies of our time, one that unfolded in a foggy city 6,000 miles to the east.

This father is Deer’s best witness among the parents of the 12 children described in the Lancet paper – in fact, his only one, the lone parent who is hostile to Wakefield, not just a little frosty, but coldly angry. His anonymous comments to Deer in the BMJ seemed to fully support the January 5, 2011, cover story: “Secrets of the MMR Scare: How the Case Against the MMR Was Fixed.”

“The father need not have worried,” Deer continued. “My investigation of the MMR issue exposed the frauds behind Wakefield’s research.”

Child 11, in fact, was Deer’s opening.

He was among those “whose parents apparently blamed MMR,” but Deer commented acidly that “Child 11’s case must have been a disappointment. Records show his behavioural symptoms began too soon.” [Italics in original] Deer quoted from a Royal Free Hospital discharge summary: “His developmental milestones were normal until 13 months of age. In the period 13-18 months he developed slow speech patterns and repetitive hand movements. Over this period his parents remarked on his slow gradual deterioration.”

Deer summarized: “That put the symptom two months earlier than reported in the Lancet, and a month before the boy had MMR. And this was not the only anomaly to catch the father’s eye. …” (Note that it is Deer, not the discharge paper, saying the symptoms came “a month before the boy had MMR.”)

The BMJ report was the coup de grace for serious consideration of a link between vaccines and autism. Wakefield was “convicted of fraud,” wrote Time magazine in an article titled “The Dangers of the Antivaccine Movement.” An editorial in The New York Times, titled Autism Fraud,noted Britain’s General Medical Council had already stripped Wakefield of his medical license, and the Lancet retracted the paper: “Now the British Medical Journal has taken the extraordinary step of publishing a lengthy report by Brian Deer, the British investigative journalist who first brought the paper’s flaws to light — and has put its own reputation on the line by endorsing his findings.”

Indeed it did.

“Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare,” Editor in Chief Fiona Godlee wrote. She said “there is no doubt it was Wakefield” who was responsible for the “elaborate fraud,” despite having 12 co-authors.

Hold the door, please. I was about to learn that Deer’s explosive claim about Child 11 – Exhibit A in this alleged hoax -- was false. And that was just the first step of my journey into a world where things were not at all as they seemed.

--

The father opened the file folder – guarding the papers against a fickle coastal breeze -- and showed me a letter he had written on January 1, 1997, to “Dr. Andrew Wakefield, Royal Free Hospital, London, England.”

"My son [name deleted] at age 15 months, was immunized with the Merck MMR vaccine and became ill for the next several months,” the letter began.

“As his pediatric records indicate he came down with a viral infection, and shortly thereafter viral pneumonia. His condition slowly deteriorated over time, and was diagnosed as being autistic on his birthday at age 3. The onset of his autistic behavior began around 18 months. … He was diagnosed as moderate to severe, with no speech, no eye contact, and cognitive function at 6 months overall.”

Multiple specialists in the United States confirmed the autism diagnosis, the letter added, as well as their suspicions of the MMR vaccine as the cause. Further workups in California also revealed “indeterminant inflammatory bowel disease” -- the dual syndrome Wakefield was then investigating at the Royal Free. That was why the father wanted the hospital’s pediatric gastroenterologists to evaluate his child.

So – first came the shot, then the symptoms. The father’s account, and medical records created before he got anywhere near Wakefield, could not be clearer. But didn’t he tell Brian Deer exactly the opposite, as recounted in the opening of the BMJ cover story? And didn’t a hospital record confirm that?

No. And no.

Though you’d never know it, the father was actually disputing how long after the shot specific symptoms occurred. In fact, the father did directly blame the MMR for causing his son’s illnesses and autistic regression – a fact that appears to have escaped Deer’s notice, or at least acknowledgement.

Yes, the father was angry at Wakefield. Yes, he disagreed with other points, some of them unrelated to the content of the Lancet article. But no – he did not say that the symptoms came before the shot. That was not an “anomaly” in the Lancet paper that caught his eye, as Deer wrote.

And the discharge document itself? It was simply wrong, one of thousands of pieces of paper generated by many medical personnel in a complicated medical case stretching over many years; perhaps the “13-18 months” was a typo for “15-18,” since that is what the father had reported all along. Regardless, the father says he never told Deer that the symptoms came first, and there is no evidence to the contrary. Deer apparently did not bother to check that one piece of paper against the large volume of other evidence, or to confirm it with the father, or to make sure that his own claim that symptoms began “a month before the boy had MMR” coincided with any actual chronology.

As far as I can tell, no one on the planet -- no doctor, no parent, no document – has ever said Child 11 was anything but healthy and developing normally before the MMR. No one, that is, but Brian Deer in the BMJ. And here we see Deer at work: Because Wakefield was by definition a fraud – because Deer said so – any discrepancies between data in the Lancet paper and any other source was proof against Wakefield. One document says 13-18 months for the period of regression? That was evidence enough that Wakefield “used bogus data … to manufacture a link” between the MMR and autism.

---

To my surprise as we sat outside in Southern California, the father told me he hadn’t read the BMJ article, and he declined my offer to quote from it or have him read it during our visit. He would rather lay out the sequence in his own words, he told me.

That turned out to be a useful approach.

His son had been completely healthy and developing normally, he said, until the MMR shot at 15 months triggered a downhill progression.

“I very much believe it,” he said about the relationship of the shot to the symptoms: The measles component of the vaccine triggered an immune deficiency that produced the cascade of devastating physical and mental problems. This, in fact, was Wakefield’s provisional hypothesis.

When I showed Father 11 what Deer had written about the shot-and-symptoms sequence, he said, emphatically, “That’s not correct.”

A few days later, after he read the BMJ piece, the father sent Deer and myself an email.

“Mr. Deer’s article makes me appear irrational for continuing to believe that the MMR caused difficulties which predated its administration, but until the incorrect dates in the discharge summary were pointed out to me this week, I failed to realize that the discharge summary was inaccurate.”

The father wrote that this was an honest mistake on Deer’s part.

“Based on the incorrect discharge summary I shared with him, Mr. Deer reasonably inferred that my son’s autistic symptoms predated his receipt of the MMR vaccination, which they did not.”

I’m no engineer, but neither is Father 11 a journalist. As someone familiar with the norms of my profession, I had rather a different reaction. I found it hard to see how Deer -- who interviewed the father in person twice, once in California and once in London, corresponded by email, and must have heard the same story I did — could get something so important so wrong. The number of times he used the father’s quotes to misleading effect – appearing to angrily assert that the symptoms preceded the shot – was too high; the way he did it seemed too artful.

He made the father appear irrational. Yet when I met him, Father 11 was as straightforward and precise as you might expect from a successful engineer. By the time I finished my Peet’s, I had no doubt about the chronology or the documentation.

Besides, the imperative to get the facts correct – and to correct them promptly and prominently if called for – is implacable. Even more than a hurried newspaper account, there were not supposed to be any mistakes in Deer’s work in the august British Medical Journal. They said so themselves.

“The BMJ stands by the article by Brian Deer and the linked editorial published on 5 January,” Godlee wrote in February in response to e-mails critical of its reporting by readers at Age of Autism. “The article, which was subjected to peer review and editorial checking, was based on enquiries carried out over some seven years, involving, among other things, interviews with parents of children enrolled in Andrew Wakefield's research. Four such parents are quoted in the article. As made clear in the article, the core data on which the findings were based were evidenced, except in the case of one child, by the transcript of a General Medical Council fitness to practise hearing which sat between July 2007 and May 2010.”

That “one child” – the exception for which no independent evidence existed -- was Child 11.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism. He is the co-author, with Mark Blaxill, of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, published in paperback in September by Thomas Dunne Books.

Comments

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Let me try that again:

Brian Deer is still claiming that the brief representation of Child 11 in the Lancet paper is a complete fabrication.

But since Father 11 maintained to the Royal Free that his son's MMR vaccination was the ultimate cause of his son's autism (with the proximate cause being an illness of many months duration), how could Wakefield have *otherwise* compressed this information into a short table entry without misrepresenting Father 11's opinion?

Brian Deer is still claiming that the brief representation of Child 11 in the Lancet paper is a complete fabrication.

But since Father 11 maintained to the Royal Free that his son's MMR vaccination was the ultimate cause of his son's autism (with the proximate cause being an illness of many months duration), how could Wakefield have compressed this information into a short table entry without misrepresenting Father 11's opinion?

I don't know if substituting "13" for "15" was an error in transcription or an error made in a handwritten discharge summary. Dr. Casson made at least two errors in his discharge summaries related to dates: one for Child 2 and one for Child 5.

Since Child 11's case wasn't part of the GMC hearing, Dr. Casson wouldn't have been asked about it.

Speaking of Father and Child 11, Deer assures us: “'His [Child 11's] developmental milestones were normal until 13 months of age,' notes the discharge summary. 'In the period 13-18 months he developed slow speech patterns and repetitive hand movements. Over this period his parents remarked on his slow gradual deterioration.'

That put the first symptom two months earlier than reported in the Lancet, and a month before the boy received the MMR vaccination. And this was not the only anomaly to catch the father’s eye."

But that's a fabrication on Deer's part because it *didn't* catch Father 11's eye. Father 11 didn't notice the discharge summary said "13-18 months" and Deer, for his own reasons, didn't point it out to him. Father 11 didn't notice until much later when Dan Olmsted asked him about it, after which Father 11 wrote to both Deer and Olmsted:

“Mr. Deer’s article makes me appear irrational for continuing to believe that the MMR caused difficulties which predated its administration, but until the incorrect dates in the discharge summary were pointed out to me this week, I failed to realize that the discharge summary was inaccurate.”

Who to believe, Father 11 or Deer? Father 11's introductory letter to Wakefield makes it crystal clear that his son's "slow gradual deterioration" occurred after MMR, between 15-18 months. Father 11 is telling the truth.

“Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare,” Editor in Chief Fiona Godlee wrote. She said “there is no doubt it was Wakefield” who was responsible for the “elaborate fraud,” despite having 12 co-authors.

It was not enough for Fiona Godlee to 'convict' Andrew Wakefield of 'fraud' via Deer's BMJ articles. She was also hell bent on discrediting ALL of Dr Wakefield's previous and subsequent research. The series of Deer BMJ articles entitled 'Secrets of the MMR scare', also instigated a complaint about Dr Wakefield's 'fraudulent' research by Godlee to University College London, prompting the following response:-
UCL response : Professor Sir John Tooke, Vice-Provost (Health)http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452.full/reply#bmj_el_247716
Professor David Price, Vice-Provost (Research)

Replies to BMJ Wakefield Lancet article was fraudulent:-
"UCL takes any allegation of research misconduct very seriously, and we will certainly investigate those raised in the BMJ. At this point, however, we have not been given the opportunity to view all of the articles to be published in the BMJ relating to this issue. We are therefore currently able to give only a general institutional response to the issues so far raised..................

In reference to the BMJ's recent request for UCL to investigate Andrew Wakefield's research papers, we fully acknowledge the need to look closely at the research of someone alleged in your article to have carried out research misconduct and for this process to be subject to external scrutiny, in line with our procedures in this area. We are carefully considering how we might conduct this investigation in light of the complex legal, practical and logistical aspects involved.
We are determined to learn from the mistakes made in relation to this case. It will, unfortunately, never be possible to have a system which absolutely guarantees to prevent research misconduct - and it is vital that governance procedures avoid obstructing valuable research."

Dr Wakefield WAS NOT found guilty of research FRAUD by the GMC. This was PURELY the 'invention' of Brian Deer, via Murdoch's Sunday Times and BMJ Editor Godlee.

Deer's BMJ articles also accused Dr Wakefield and his Royal Free Colleagues of misappropriating Legal Aid cash. This would have been a criminal offence in the UK and would inevitably have been the subject of police charges and investigations. No police charges were ever brought against Dr Wakefield or any of his Royal Free colleagues.

The only FRAUD in all of this has been carried out by Brian Deer and Fiona Godlee, via those BMJ and Murdoch newspaper articles, and blatantly endorsed by their lies and misinformation conveyed to a gullible US public on TV appearances and lectures. In spite of this, the 'Wakefield' message is slowly getting through.

So let me see, we had Brian Deer (mis)leading everyone to believe that Child 1 had the "pervasive ignoring" characteristic of autism rather than the ear infection noted in the child's medical records. Now we have him doing something very similar with Child 11. In both of these instances, Deer misled us in order to put the child's regression before his MMR.

What a desperate joke looking at that old Deer interview that Media Scholar posted. Deer alleging that Andy Wakefield's demeanour ought to alert suspicion - has anyone observed Deer's in this interview? The only expression is an all purpose sneer. If Deer is going to raise the issue of "demeanour" he is not a winner.

Yes Media Scholar,I agree with you.If you very carefully
listen to his speech, brian deer says that he "he worked
seven years" to get to the bottom of this study.Nobody
works for seven years just to destroy a good doctor like
Dr.Wakefield. He also says a routine "assignment" was given to him.(a slip of the tongue)It is plain and clear that he was HIRED by big
pharma and BMJ to do the dirty job.Nobody is allowed to stand in the way of a multi-billion dollar vaccine business.
"Brian" as known by others gives it all away on CTV.
His lips are not even straight as he speaks(as the well memorized lies flow through). This is my analysis as a
body language reader.

2. Is this parent also angry with clinician Professor Walker Smith, who was in charge of the department at the Royal Free Hospital at the time of his son's investigations and treatments?

3.Was this father unhappy with his son's diagnosis and treatment at the Royal Free, or was he unhappy with the 1998 Lancet article? Remember, Dr Wakefield was employed as a research scientist at the time and had no clinical access to these children.

I posted this before but it seems to be lost. I just wonder why the father was angry at Wakefield? I think this is significant and extremely important work by Age of Autism but I got stuck with this, that he was angry with Wakefield.

Yes, it is part of the spirit of authoritarian deception that the retraction label makes it virtually impossible to read the text: on the way to heretical book burnings: you can't find out what it is you are not supposed to know. If you could read it then you would find that it had never said the things which had been claimed against it anyway - and that would lead to the question "why"?

But, of course, un-defaced copies are quite easily downloadable from the web for the time being. Fundamentally, this is a story which goes back to the invention of the printing press and the availability of knowledge, and the web is the latest revolution. We are dealing with people who cannot afford the free and democratic exchange of information. However, they do not presently control everything.

EARLY REPORT
Summary
Background We investigated a consecutive series of (12)
children with chronic enterocolitis and regressive
developmental disorder."

Thanks Carol, my own well thumbed copy was looking dog eared. The last time I looked this had RETRACTED written all over it!! Since this was published, 13 years ago, many of Dr Wakefield's hypotheses and comments have become quietly accepted by the medical community. They include the following:-

The TITLE of the disorder 'Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia'

“We describe a pattern of colitis and ileal-lymphoidnodular
hyperplasia in children with developmental
disorders. Intestinal and behavioural pathologies may
have occurred together by chance, reflecting a selection
bias in a self-referred group; however, the uniformity of
the intestinal pathological changes and the fact that
previous studies have found intestinal dysfunction in
children with autistic-spectrum disorders, suggests that
the connection is real and reflects a unique disease
process.” Page 3
(Deer has always claimed that this syndrome does not exist)

“We identified associated gastrointestinal
disease and developmental regression in a group of
previously normal children, which was generally associated
in time with possible environmental triggers.” Page 1
(In spite of strenuous ‘establishment’ efforts to make autism a purely genetic condition, research studies strongly indicate enviromental triggers)

“If there is a causal link between measles, mumps, and
rubella vaccine and this syndrome, a rising incidence
might be anticipated after the introduction of this vaccine
in the UK in 1988” Page 5
(In spite of obvious manipulation of the Thorsen /Madson Danish and other studies, there is no question that autism is now a world wide epidemic.)

“A genetic predisposition to autistic-spectrum disorders is suggested by over-representation in boys and a greater concordance rate in monozygotic than in dizygotic twins.” Page 5
(The paper did not rule out a genetic predisposition and indeed seems to concur with this hypothesis.)

“We did not prove an association between measles,
mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.”
Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve
this issue. “Page 5
(Dr Wakefield’s/ Professor O’Leary’s virological studies have now been replicated by other scientists)

Every time I read this paper I am impressed by the RIGHTNESS of this early study and how accurate the Wakefield et al HYPOTHESES have turned out to be.

Thank you Dan Olmstead et al and AoA for keeping up the pressure on Deer and his 'anonymous' paymasters.

Important investigative reporting, thank you! Deer's article seemed so much like smoke and cobwebs to me that I can't help wondering how anyone, at least someone wanting to get to the truth, cannot help but suspect the mainstream headlines when reading his constructions, but I can't judge how I would have taken the article if not already keenly following the story.

I sense a lot of hate for Andrew Wakefield coming from this guy in California.

But you have to balance your opinion against the fact that Deer was hired by the vaccine manufacturing drug companies to plant one on Wakefield good. We simply know too much about Deer to simply excuse this slimy business of his.

With the one mom, Deer kept flipping the same cassette tape over and over. He made numerous visits to the loo. He was wired, and he didn't tell an honest mum who thought she heard him right when he said he was helping her fight for her vaccine injured kid.

He lied about who he was. Did he also lie about facts and make false statements so he could get his "story"?

Deer's own words condemn him.

Watch this very carefully. Deer reveals why he was hired to destroy Wakefield in place.

If fact, Deer acknowledges that according to his viewpoint, Wakefield was attempting to compete with drug companies. If Deer works for the drug companies, he is a part of a combination in restraint of trade making Wakefield and whoever else was working on his Measles countermeasures.

Please review this study:Intestinal Pathophysiology in Autism from John F. White.The researcher has a 23 year old son Ted with autism.He also discusses how the CNS activity
changes when exorphins (eg.casein,gluten,mercury,viruses-first trigger the mast cells in the gut system-then inflammatory molecules released;the gut-blood-brain barrier
is disrupted which allows>(this is my understanding from an other study)or enterotoxic molecules to enter the brain.
B12 deficiency can also (poor absorption when gut is
damaged)cause impaired nerve function.http://ebm.rsmjournals.com/

I wonder if the BMJ will try to wiggle out of this one with as creative an excuse as Dr. Fiona Godlee's claim that she "didn't know" for seven years that Merck and GSK manufacture MMR, and therefore "didn't know" about her journal's conflicts of interest.

In the current environment, First Do No Harm should be renamed the Hypocritical Oath.

I must say that I do not think my son regressed with the MMR vaccine. I think there was something wrong before he had it. However, I cannot believe the lynching that Wakefield has received over the years. I have a provider that is majoring in psychology and her professor just gave a lecture the other day on how vaccines have nothing to do with autism and tore Wakefield apart. Well, there was another paper released several months ago verifying that ASD children have problems with carbohydrate digestion and dysbiosis in the gut. You should read the paper, three of Wakefield's papers were cited. Hmmmm, where is the press? All I hear are crickets. Here is the link to the paper.

The position of the BMJ, reminds me of when new evidence comes up regarding a condemned man - and the powers that be refuse to look at it. Preferring a gross injustice be done than admit they are wrong.

I work in the hyperbaric oxygen therapy industry and I have personally seen the miracle that this therapy can do for someone with a autism. It helps the brain begin to function normally by saturating the blood with oxygen through permeation and osmosis. This helps the vascular system (veins and arteries) to start creating new capillaries thus helping the brain to fix itself. There is a website www.hyperbaricnation.org and it lists centers and facilities nationwide to help people find the help they need. If you are wanting to have a chamber in your own home go to www.hypernaric-options.com

Not that it matters in relation to the issue of what a d-bag Brian Deer is or how intellectually corrupt the BMJ is, but I wonder what issue the father of Child 11 had with Dr. Wakefield. Has that been brought to light in any of the published information on the subject? Seems like Dr. Wakefield and his collegues' work on the subject of GI disease in children with autism is aimed at helping his child.

More on point, I continue to be amazed how such a critical fact in the fraud charges against Dr. Wakefield could be so calliously overlooked. Where is Anderson Cooper on this story? Oh yeah, still trying to get that Kim Kardashian interview. God help us.

Hundreds of thousands of parents can not all be wrong. I'm glad that as far as research is concerned, there are scientists investigating the possible vaccine connection - despite the enormous pressure from big pharm to keep pushing vaccines.

Thank you for your investigation - it makes more sense than you realize.